I see many organisations looking at TFS and trying to make the decision on why should I use Visual Studio ALM. Often you already have some tools and you want to move to TFS, or you have TFS and you are evaluating other tools as part of a reorganisation.
I was contacted yesterday by a customer that, as part of a reorganisation, is looking to replace Visual Studio ALM with Git and Jenkins. This is very confusing to me as Visual Studio ALM does not equal Git and Jenkins. First, a Git and Jenkins combination provides only a small part of the platform that is Visual Studio ALM. Second, Visual Studio ALM provides Git as part of its platform. So in this case, with a move from Visual Studio ALM to Git and Jenkins we are removing over 90% of our available functionality for only getting whatever the difference between TF Build and Jenkins is. That does not seem like a good comparison, let alone a good decision…
So what are the considerations when looking at a change to your tooling. There are three key questions that you need to answer:
There is a lot more to an ALM tool than simple source and compilation. So let’s look at what we mean by Application Lifecycle Management tooling. This is a long list so bear with me:
These are the key areas that you have to decide what your plan is for each one. Regardless of wither you will be using Excel for requirements management, or Trello, you need to make that decision. So here, if we are going to replace TFS with Git and Jenkins we need to decide what we are going to do with Analytics, Lab, Release, Defects, Feedback, Quality, Tasks, Change, Projects, and Requirements. What have you missed?
So now that we have identified what is part of an ALM system what are the comparable choices? Luckily there are organisations out there that do the analysis and have come up with an independent comparison.
At this point you might be asking where Git and Jenkins are in this picture. Well they are so far to the left bottom of this graph that they do not even register. Git + Jenkins is only a tiny part of that Visual Studio ALM story. Indeed with TFS 2013 Microsoft has baked Git into the platform and with TFS 2015 we are getting cross-platform build agents as well as an end-to-end ALM story for Android and iOS.
At this time, according to Gartner, there is not better ALM platform than Visual Studio ALM.
One potentially valuable exercise is to script out your organisational workflow at a high level from the perspective of tool support. The workflow above is what I teach companies to use and it maps pretty well with Visual Studio ALM. You then have a choice to make. You can either build your own custom ALM solution or choose one that already exists. You can check out my end-to-end demo from NDC London , while not everything went perfectly you can see the story.
I imagine that you can think of your favourite tool for each of the ALM capability areas. Think about your favourite tool for a moment for each of those capabilities. Have you picked one for requirements management? How about build and source?
OK, Now think about how you might want to join that together.
I could go on creating scenarios all day, but let’s focus on just these two. Think about your favourite tools for requirements and test management that we added to the list. How will they be integrated? Do you know how to integrate Excel for my test results and the build that the tests were executed against? Do you know which parts of your codebase produces the most bugs so that you can understand your complexity?
There are tools out there to help you knit your custom home groan ALM solution together. One such is TaskTop which is an awesome tool, but you then need to licence many tools and have them work together. Now think about who you go to for support?
In my experience it is best to start small and grow, however migrating toolsets is next to impossible and causes infinite frustration. You need an ALM tool that you can use only part of and that will grow with you adding new functionality as you go. You want an ALM tool that figures out what data goes together itself so that I don’t have to do all of the work in knitting it together. In my experience the only tool that works at that level is Visual Studio ALM.
You can even start as small as a single project in Visual Studio Online (TFS in the cloud) and then scale to an entire enterprise. Scott Gu recently talked about the trial and tribulations of moving the Windows teams at Microsoft to Visual Studio Online so you can even start big.
Do you want to maintain your own hybrid solution? Coz it’s a lot of work to get what Visual Studio ALM provides out of the box to hand together effectively. For me, I am happy to use TFS and VSO for both small simple solutions, and for large complicated ones.
What is your ALM story?
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
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